Links of Interest

Best of June 2008

Noupe with another very nice monthly roundup of good design-y stuff around the web last month. I like these giant monthly roundup posts. Gives a good monthly goal of trying to write things that are worthy of being on it. Didn't Smashing Magazine used to do monthly roundups and then just randomly stopped?

Google now indexes Flash content

All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.

One less excuse to avoid Flash now when customers want it. At least we still have "accessibility".

Ian Whitmore

A friend of mine recently recieved his MFA from UI-Bloomington and he sent me a link to another UI alumni, photographer Ian Whitmore. The "Channels" series is particularly cool. An interesting take on portraiture.

Interview

I was interviewed again this week. This time by Webia, the "Web International Awards". There is no direct link to it, but this page should have it and then you can see the whole thing with the "full story" link.

Weekend Issues

Thanks to everyone who emailed last Friday about the downtime. My MySQL container on Media Temple was kaput and needed a manual restart. Was down for a quite a few hours there, so sorry about that. Then I thought I would get smart and start using WP Super Cache. This is the third time now I've tried to use a caching plugin, and it's the third time now that it has completed wrecked my RSS feed. I tried doing everything suggested in this thread, still no dice. I think it's basically caching my feed even though I'm telling it not to, which then serves up my feed as a web page and not an XML document which obviously feed readers can't handle.

Re: Google now indexes Flash content
This is quite an unfortunate turn of events. Just when I thought Flash was finally starting to lose traction!

I find this interesting (from the Google Webmasters FAQ):

Blockquote
Q: What do I need to do to get Google to index the text in my Flash files?
Basically, you don’t need to do anything. The improvements that we have made do not require any special action on the part of web designers or webmasters. If you have Flash content on your website, we will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability (see next question).

Suddenly, we will see a rise in search results containing content that was never meant to be indexed. Could produce some funny/embarrasing results!

The new Flash reading function from Google is basically rubbish, as it seems. Doesn’t work with swf’s that are loaded with javascript. That means that flash loaded with methods like swfObject won’t be read. What’s that, 90% of the market?

This comment thread is closed. If you have important information to share, please contact us.